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AZ-08: GOPers Charge Mehlman Lied To Them
Four GOP candidates for Congress in Arizona's eighth, including frontrunner Randy Graf, have taken the extraordinary step of releasing a joint statement blasting Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman for breaking his vow to stay out of their race. The statement -- prompted by a recent RNC $122,000 ad buy for candidate Steve Huffman, who the RNC thinks is the only one who can win -- describes a meeting between the candidates and the RNC chair at which Mehlman supposedly promised to keep the national GOP out of the race: "Sadly, the promises that were made have been broken." Full statement here.
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Is this a lie? I don't mean to argue semantics but a broken promise is not a lie. The statement simply says that promises were broken. Now if Mehlman was planning to enter the primary when he said he was not, then yes, he is a liar. But if he changed his mind after his promise, he's not a liar--he's just an a**hole.
September 6, 2006 3:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
Point taken, but I have heard Ken Mehlman many times, and I promise you this:
Is is a lier AND an asshole.
Jan Knaus
September 6, 2006 4:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
You hit the nail on the head, Cville Dem!
September 6, 2006 8:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
The statement said, "Mehlman made it clear that the national Republican Party would stay out of the primary race."
If he said he would stay out and then he got in, that sounds like a lie to me.
Regardless, I think the distinction between breaking a promise and lying is not so great anyway.
September 6, 2006 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
When someone Promises something to someone with no intention to keep it but in fact with the intention to break it, it is formally a lie. Why? Because a lie is defined as "uttering a falsehood with the intention to deceive”. If the person Promises to "stay out of the race" but has no intention of keeping his promise he is lying. If a person makers a promise and when he makes it he intends to keep it but subsequently changes his mind and breaks the promise, then he did not lie when he made the promise. That's it in a nutshell.
September 7, 2006 12:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
When someone Promises something to someone with no intention to keep it but in fact with the intention to break it, it is formally a lie. Why? Because a lie is defined as "uttering a falsehood with the intention to deceive”. If the person Promises to "stay out of the race" but has no intention of keeping his promise he is lying. If a person makers a promise and when he makes it he intends to keep it but subsequently changes his mind and breaks the promise, then he did not lie when he made the promise. That's it in a nutshell.
September 7, 2006 12:01 AM | Reply | Permalink
Is it really a lie if he didn't really mean it, and if nobody believed him when he said it?
September 7, 2006 11:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
Ken Mehlman is fighting to keep HIS JOB.Therefore, he will be as Rovian as he can be, so he doesn't get blamed for the loss of the House, and a much weaker control in the Senate come this November.
I suspect that if the Republicans lose really big, ala 1994 Democrat losses, Mr Mehlman, and his not-so-merry henchmen, will be blamed for strategy and 'incoherant ideology', and will be purged from the party leadership.
So did he lie? Maybe, maybe not. But what he did do, was screw with four candidates in his own party. The signs of a desparate party Chair.
Beware of the fanatics, they never see gray.
September 7, 2006 2:25 PM | Reply | Permalink